Dodgy Mother’s Day ads open thread

Ah, Mother’s Day, that time when our media and shopping spaces fill up with the assumption that “What Mum Wants” is a universal concept. Just once I’d love to see a ‘last minute gifts for Mum’ suggestion list that includes a kabuki sword, a new modem, and a chemistry set. Or maybe noise-cancelling earphones, and a new podcasting microphone. And a butler.

This week, I’d just signed up for Lenovo’s mailing list in the hope of spotting a special, which it turned out was just in time! Just in time to be asked whether I was Fashionista Mum, Super Mum, Foodie Mum, Breakfast in Bed Mum or Bargainista Mum. A fellow geek feminist pointed out the inexplicable absence of Installing Linux the Moment It Arrives Mum. Funny that.

Got any bouquets or brickbats for geeky Mother’s Day ads? Or anything else you want to talk about in an open thread?

About open threads: open threads are for comments on any subject at all, including past posts, things we haven’t posted on, what you’ve been thinking or doing, etc as long as it follows our comment policy. We’re always looking for fluffy, fun, silly, cute or beautiful open thread starters, please post links to Pinboard with the “gffun” tag.

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About Mary

Mary is a women in tech activist, a programmer, a writer, and a sometime computational linguist. She writes at puzzling.org. Her previous projects include co-founding the Ada Initiative and major contributions to the Geek Feminism blog. She's @me_gardiner on Twitter.

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2 thoughts on “Dodgy Mother’s Day ads open thread”

I’d love to see a catalogue from one of the major retailers which didn’t assume Mum was only interested in either Romance, Biography or Autobiography, Dieting or Cooking as genres for books. So much for the Mum (like mine) who enjoyed science fiction and fantasy. Fortunately, the Festival of Fluffy Pink Slippers is now over for another year, and my mother was quite pleased with the chrysanthemum I gave her.

I hope I am doing this right. I checked the Contact Us page and it recommended making all comments public (if possible) and to use the last open thread post for general comments that aren’t aimed at specific blog posts. That is what I am attempting to do.

I have been a twitter user for a couple years, though only recently started using it heavily and following people in tech and feminism and other intersecting interests. There has been a lot of vitrol and very little response from Twitter as a corporation in terms of helping people not be abused and harrassed. In fact, Twitter is making it easier for abusive behaviors to happen.

I love the twitter format and I hate to see what is happening to it and how people are negatively effected by it. I’ve heard of diaspora, which as I understand it is an open source microblogging platform.

I’m curious if anyone knows of perhaps a NPO or OS comm that is using this platform and having it cater to marginalized users? I haven’t done a lot of research (mostly because I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing though I’m not opposed to putting in the effort to learn if someone has guidance); however, couldn’t one create a pod (that’s what diaspora calls them as I understand it) that is perhaps user supported via kickstarter or gittip or other such payment processors (or can be ad driven I guess if people want, though that seems to make things sticky real quick like). Possibly something the way dreamwidth went about it? Open source, volunteer driven/supported as well as a dedicated staff, interested in developing things based on user feedback and not on what data can be gathered and who they can sell the users to.

My apologies for the disconnected thinking. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Anyhow, I think that could be a really positive offering to the internet community and I would like to help something like that out. If anyone knows of such a project in the works. Or perhaps someone would be willing to offer some advice on how to go about seeing if such a thing was even possible to begin trying. Maybe I could give a shot at organizing and researching and trying to get the project going. I know some code (HTML, Javascript, a bit of C) and I’ve been using computers in an intermediate to advance way for more than half my life. I just don’t have much in the way of formal education and I certainly don’t know anything about professional or business standards or any of that.

Anyhow, this was just an idea that I had based off the small amount of information I know. So I wanted to bring it up to other like-minded people. Rarely am I the first to think of these things afterall.